Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  The effort of the exorcisms was too much. This was the moment when his friends and family worried about him most. ‘I was overwhelmed,’ he said. ‘Over the months, I’d become accustomed to hearing the stories of survivors. But all of a sudden, I found myself listening to the voices of the dead.’

  Most difficult to bear were the occasions when Rumiko was possessed by the personalities of children. ‘When a child appeared,’ Kaneta said, ‘my wife took her hand. She said, “It’s Mummy – it’s Mummy here. It’s alright, it’s all alright. Let’s go together.”’ The first to appear was a tiny nameless boy, too young to understand what was being said to him, or to do more than call for his mother over and over again. The second was a girl of seven or eight years old. She kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She had been with her even younger brother when the tsunami struck, and tried to run away with him. But in the water, as they were both drowning, she had let go of his hand; now she was afraid that her mother would be angry. She said, ‘There’s a black wave coming, Mummy. I’m scared, Mummy. Mummy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  The voice of the girl was terrified and confused; her body was drifting helplessly in the cold water, and it was a long struggle to guide her upwards towards the light. ‘She gripped my wife’s hand tightly until she finally came to the gate of the world of light,’ Kaneta recalled. ‘Then she said, “Mum, I can go on my own now, you can let go.”’

  Afterwards, Mrs Kaneta tried to describe the moment when she released the hand of the young-woman-as-little-drowned-girl. The priest himself was weeping for pity at her lonely death, and for the twenty thousand other stories of terror and extinction. But his wife was aware only of a huge energy dissipating. It made her remember the experience of childbirth, and the sense of power discharging at the end of pain, as the newborn child finally enters the world.

  An easing of walls,

  A shuddering through soles:

  A petal loosens, falls.

  In the room, alone:

  It begins, then it has gone.

  Ripples outlast stone.

  Rain-smell stirs the heart;

  Nostrils flare. A breath. We wait

  For something to start.

  Anthony Thwaite

  Notes

  This is a true story, based in large part on the accounts of the individuals named and quoted in its pages, and on my own observation. Other sources are recorded below.

  Among the various authors I have consulted, I am indebted above all to Masaki Ikegami. Without his painstaking reporting, it would have been much more difficult to piece together events at Okawa Primary School, during and after the disaster.

  Japanese names are given in the western order: given name first, family name last. Conversions of Japanese yen are approximate, and based on the exchange rate prevailing at the time. On 11 March 2011, one pound was worth about ¥131.

  1: 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death or drowned – The most commonly cited figures for casualties of the disaster are those published by Japan’s National Police Agency, which counts separately the number of people killed and those officially regarded as missing. The former includes only those whose for whom a death certificate has been issued; but at this late stage, all those in the latter category can also be assumed to be dead. On 10 March 2017, there were 15,893 dead and 2,553 missing, a total of 18,446. See http://www.npa.go.jp/archive/keibi/biki/higaijokyo_e.pdf.

  The separate count by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency records a significantly higher figure – 19,475 dead and 2,587 missing, a total of 22,062. This includes those who died after the disaster from causes related to it, such as sick people whose health deteriorated after they were forced to move precipitately from hospitals, and suicides. See http://www.fdma.go.jp/bn/higaihou/pdf/jishin/154.pdf.

  Prologue: Solid Vapour

  1: It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan – Kenneth Chang, ‘Quake Moves Japan Closer to U.S. and Alters Earth’s Spin’, New York Times, 14 March 2011.

  2: The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage – Jeff Kingston, ‘Introduction’ in Jeff Kingston (ed), Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan, (Abingdon 2012).

  3: Japan’s remaining nuclear reactors – all fifty of them – were shut down – On the morning of 11 March 2011, Japan had 54 functioning nuclear reactors. Four of the six at Fukushima Dai-ichi were rendered unusable by the tsunami; by May 2012, all of the others had been shut down due to public opposition. Ongoing efforts are being made to restart them, but the political and technical challenges are great. As of March 2017, only three were in operation.

  4: Farmers, suddenly unable to sell their produce, committed suicide – Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘Suicide cases rise after triple disaster’, The Times, 17 June 2011; and Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘Tepco must pay damages over woman’s suicide after Fukushima leak’, Times Online, 26 August 2014, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tepco-must-pay-damages-over-womans-suicide-after-fukushima-leak-vsm5tgbmh83.

  5: ‘All at once … something we could only have imagined was upon us’ – Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York, 1998), p. 7.

  Having Gone I Will Come

  1: her son’s graduation ceremony from middle school – The Japanese school system is modelled on that of the United States. Children go to primary, or elementary, school from ages 6 to 12, middle school from 12 to 15, and to senior high school from 15 to 18.

  2: connecting Okawa in the south with the Kitakami district on the northern bank – The district on the south bank of the river, a sub-municipality of the city of Ishinomaki, is officially called Kahoku. Okawa is an older name for the area, but for ease of understanding, I have used it as a general term for the catchment area of Okawa Primary School. It is pronounced with a long ‘O’, close to English ‘ore-cow-uh’.

  Jigoku

  1: She went on: ‘He lifted up one of the blankets …’ – In this passage I have drawn on my own interviews with Sayomi Shito, and on Chris Heath’s fine article, ‘Graduation Day’, GQ (US edition), 1 July 2011.

  Abundant Nature

  1: the meeting point, deep beneath the ocean, of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates – For an accessible account of the workings of earthquakes and tsunamis, see Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York, 2010).

  2: People cried and screamed, and could not stand. – This is my adaptation of a translation from the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku [‘The True History of Three Reigns of Japan’] of 901A.D. which appears in Jeff Kingston (ed.), Tsunami: Japan’s Post-Fukushima Future (Washington, 2011), p.10.

  3: Geologists found layers of fine sand – For the history of earthquakes and tsunamis on the Sanriku coast, see K. Minoura et al., ‘The 869 Jogan tsunami deposit and recurrence interval of large-scale tsunami on the Pacific coast of northeast Japan’, Journal of Natural Disaster Science, Volume 23, Number 2, 2001, pp. 83–88; and Masayuki Nakao, ‘The Great Meiji Sanriku Tsunami’, Failure Knowledge Database, Hatamura Institute for the Advancement of Technology, 2005, at http://www.sozogaku.com/fkd/en/hfen/HA1000616.pdf, accessed March 2017.

  4: On 22 May 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake – Parker, op. cit., pp. 151–152.

  5: the spiky-finned, bull-headed sculpions – Cottus pollux, the Japanese fluvial sculpion or sculpin.

  6: ‘We had so much from the river’ – quoted in Masaki Ikegami, Ano toki, Okawa shogakko de nani ga okita noka [‘What happened that day at Okawa Primary School?] (Tokyo, 2012), p.25.

  7: Three hundred and ninety-three people lived in Kamaya – Ikegami, op. cit., p.23.

  The Old and the Young

  1: one of the disaster’s oldest victims – Remarkably, Shimokawara was probably not the very oldest person to die in the tsunami. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, op. cit., twenty-five of those confirmed dead were 100 or over, three of them men, and 22 of them women.

  2: Fifty-four per cent per
cent of those who perished were 65 or older – Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, ‘Jinko dotai tokei kara mita Higashi Nihon daishinsai ni yoru shibo no jokyo ni tsuite’ [‘On mortality caused by the Great East Japan Disaster based on demographic statistics’] (Tokyo, 2011) at http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/kakutei11/dl/14_x34.pdf, accessed March 2017. People of 75 and older made up a third of the dead; a man in his forties was more than twice as likely to have perished as one in his twenties.

  3: In the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia – Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘The town left without women’, The Times, 12 January 2005.

  4: Out of the 18,500 dead and missing, only 351 – fewer than one in fifty – were schoolchildren – ‘Over 110 schoolchildren die or go missing in tsunami after being picked up by parents’, Mainichi Daily News, 12 August 2011.

  5: a man named Teruyuki Kashiba – I made repeated requests to speak to Mr Kashiba, but received no response.

  Explanations

  1: ‘Good evening to you all,’ he croaked – Gakko Kyoiku-Ka, Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, ‘Kaigi-roku’, Okawa shougakko hogosha setsumeikai [School Education Section, Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, ‘Proceedings of Meeting’, in ‘Explanatory Meeting for the Parents of Okawa Primary School’], 9 April 2011.

  2: He rewrote the plan to require escape up a steep hill – information from Katsura Sato.

  3: Tricky old bastard. – In Japanese, Tanuki oyaji: literally, ‘father raccoon dog’ – the raccoon dog being proverbially unreliable and deceitful.

  Ghosts

  1: There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue – This is my adaptation of several translations of the Heart Sutra to be found on DharmaNet, at http://www.dharmanet.org/HeartSutra.htm, accessed March 2017.

  2: academics at Tohoku University began to catalogue the stories – see Hara Takahashi, ‘The Ghosts of the Tsunami Dead and Kokoro no kea in Japan’s Religious Landscape’, Journal of Religion in Japan 5 (2016), pp. 176–198.

  3: the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors – my account of the cult of the ancestors owes much to Robert J. Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan Stanford UP, (California, 1974).

  4: ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society’ – Herbert Ooms, review of Smith, op.cit., Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 2/4 (1975).

  What It’s All About

  1: The water had reached a height of thirty-five metres here – Figures for the height of the tsunami are taken from Tsuyoshi Haraguchi and Akira Iwamatsu, Higashi Nihon Daishinsai Tsunami Shosai Chizu/Detailed Maps of the Impacts of the 2011 Japan Tsunami (bilingual, Tokyo, 2011).

  Part 3: What Happened at Okawa

  My account of the events at Okawa Primary School on 11 March draws on multiple sources, including Ikegami, op. cit.; author interviews with Toshinobu Oikawa, and Tetsuya and Hideaki Tadano; Japanese television interviews with Tetsuya Tadano, in the personal collection of Hideaki Tadano; official documents of Ishinomaki city; the final report of the Okawa Primary School Incident Verification Committee; summary documents supplied by Sayomi and Takahiro Shito; and documents submitted to Sendai District Court by Kazuhiro Yoshioka.

  The Last Hour of the Old World

  1: the Okawa school bus was waiting in the car park – Kahoku Shinpo [newspaper], ‘Gakko mae ni basu taiki’ [‘Bus was waiting in front of school’], 8 September 2011.

  2: ‘It was shaking very slowly from side to side’– BBC2, ‘Children of the Tsunami’, broadcast 1 March 2012.

  3: the city authorities would compile a minute-by-minute log of the events of that afternoon – Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, ‘Okawa shogakko tsuika kikitori chosa kiroku’, Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizoku-sama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite, [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, ‘Records of additional hearings concerning Okawa Primary School’ in ‘Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Primary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11’].

  4: The Education Plan – Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, ‘Heisei 22 nendo kyoiku keikaku Okawa shogakko (bassui)’ [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, ‘Fiscal Year 2010 Education Plan Okawa Primary School (Extracts)’], p. 81, pp. 145–146.

  5: ‘I kept looking at the cars arriving and wondering, “Is Mum going to come?”’ – BBC2, ‘Children of the Tsunami’, broadcast 1 March 2012.

  6: ‘Manno was right next to me’ – BBC2, ‘Children of the Tsunami’, broadcast 1 March 2012.

  7: an elderly man named Kazuo Takahashi – Takahashi’s story is told in Ikegami, op. cit., pp. 187–193.

  The River of Three Crossings

  1: The 118-second film – It can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW0dqWR4S7M, accessed March 2017.

  In the Web

  1: Tokyo will be shaken by an earthquake powerful enough to destroy large areas of the city – for background on the coming Tokyo earthquake, see Peter Hadfield, Sixty Seconds That Will Change the World (London, 1991), and Peter Popham, Tokyo: The City at the End of the World (Tokyo, 1985).

  2: Seismologists point out that it is not, in fact, as simple as this – Rather than committing themselves to predictions, seismologists offer probabilities. A study by the Earthquake Research Institute of Tokyo University in 2012 calculated that there is a 70 per cent chance that Tokyo will be struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7 or higher by 2042. ‘Researchers now predict 70 percent chance of major Tokyo quake within 30 years’, Mainichi Shimbun, 25 May 2012.

  3: an earthquake under Tokyo could kill as many as 13,000 people – Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘Quake experts shake Tokyo with forecast of 13,000 dead’, The Times, 15 December 2004.

  4: a tremor originating in one fault sets off earthquakes in two more – Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘Japanese make plans to survive overdue treble quake’, The Times, 13 September 2010.

  5: an earthquake and tsunami originating in the Nankai Trough – Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘Million victims from next tsunami, Japan disaster experts warn’, Times Online, 31 August 2012, at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/million-victims-from-next-tsunami-japan-disaster-experts-warn-gc3tx7vpw8s.

  6: only a tiny proportion of the victims was killed by the earthquake itself – The Kahoku Shinpo newspaper tallied 90 people who were killed by the earthquake, rather than the tsunami. It is impossible to know exactly how many people died in collapsing houses, which were then inundated by the wave, but the overall number must be relatively low. ‘Daishinsai – yure no gisei 90 nin cho’ [‘Great disaster – there were more than 90 victims from the earthquake’], Kahoku Shinpo, 17 May 2013.

  7: ‘Why does it not upset people more …?’ – Popham, op. cit., p. 28.

  8: ‘Far from being dull to the dangers …’ – Popham, op. cit., pp. 28–29 and p. 27.

  9: ‘Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made …’ – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, tr. William Weaver (London, 1974 [1972]), p.67.

  What Use Is the Truth?

  1: Kashiba claimed that immediately after the disaster – Ikegami. op. cit., pp. 91–92.

  2: ‘If it was such a big a quake that so many trees fell down …’ – Ikegami, op. cit., p.89.

  3: ‘He wore a check suit …’ – Ikegami, op. cit., p. 211.

  4: Endo wrote two letters – Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, ‘2011-nen 6-gatsu 3-nichi zuke, Endo Junji kyoyu kara no Kashiba kocho ate FAX’, Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizoku-sama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite, [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education, ‘FAX from teacher Junji Endo to headmaster Kashiba dated 3 June 2011’ in ‘Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Primary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11’].

  5: The men of the Ishinomaki city government were not villains – this section draws on Ikegami, op. cit., pp. 113–127
.

  6: a signed statement of apology addressed to the parents – Ishinomaki-shi kyoiku iinkai jimukyoku, ‘Kashiba kocho shazai-bun’, Okawa shogakko kyoshokuin no goizoku-sama he no 3.11 ni kansuru kikitori-chosa no setsumeikai no kaisai ni tsuite [Secretariat of Ishinomaki City Board of Education,‘Letter of Apology by Headmaster Kashiba’ in ‘Concerning the holding of an explanatory meeting for the bereaved families of Okawa Primary School teachers on the hearing relating to 3.11’].

  7: Its findings were published in a 200-page report – Okawa Primary School Incident Verification Committee, ‘Okawa shogakko jiko kensho hokoku-sho’ [Okawa Primary School Incident Verification Report], (Tokyo, 2014), at http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo5/012/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2014/08/07/1350542_01.pdf, accessed March 2017. See also Mainichi Shinbun, ‘Report on tsunami-hit school should be used as disaster-prevention textbook’, 28 February 2014.

  8: The committee was funded by the city at a cost of ¥57 million (£390,000) – ‘Okawasho kensho-i saishu hokokushoan ni rakutan suru izoku’ [‘Bereaved families disappointed at the final report of the Okawa Primary Verification Committee’], Shukan Diamondo (Weekly Diamond), 22 January 2014.

  9: Shigemi Kato … was promoted – Ikegami, op. cit., p.112.

  The Tsunami Is Not Water

  1: ‘The Japanese people rose from the ashes …’ – Naoto Kan, ‘Japan’s road to recovery and rebirth’, International Herald Tribune, 16 April 2011.